This doesn't fix the problem but it does fix the environmental impact.
This means that if you start acting maliciously, or even just not fulfilling your responsibilities (e.g. you let your computer go offline), then you are punished for it (depending on the severity of your offense, obviously).
Aka, you can't just wait for the money to roll in. You have to run a node, you have to verify blocks, and you have to make sure you're acting in the best interest of the network + keeping things running smoothly.
It would seem that if some participants on the network can't abide by their national laws while running some contracts, the outcome would be inevitable. And then you would just get multiple chains running under multiple governments. This seems like a reinvention of the international banking system?
Specifically you are punished for:
- Being offline (the penalty is small, and roughly equal to the rewards earned by being online
- Running the same validator twice (huge penalty, be careful!)
Plus, due to slashing, you are uniquely responsible for mistakes your validator makes. So, staking comes with both responsibilities and consequences for breaching them, just like any legal contract.
The fact that you can rent a turnkey cloud solution to do all this work for you and split the profits isn't really relevant to the argument IMO (I consider staking with Coinbase "renting cloud computing" in a specialized way).
How's that decentralized.
The times of home mining with CPU/GPUs are long gone
so do Ethereum users.
>In a PoS system there is an incentive for large stakeholders to increase block sizes.
this doesn't work because of Ethereum's social contract, just like it wouldn't work with Bitcoin.
Just because you stake a lot of ETH doesn't mean you suddenly have unilateral power to increase block sizes. There is a thing called consensus, and the entire community needs to achieve it to implement changes. Good luck trying to convince the community that bigger blocks that make it harder for small users to validate the chain is a good idea.
PoS also does not come with the property of innovation and disruption. In a PoW (especially ASIC-based) system you will find new ways to outperform your peers and disrupt old players.
PoW incentivices cheap energy in developing countries more than anything before. It is the fix for environmental problems.
That can only become true if and when governments decide to suddenly ban PoW, so that all that cheap energy services anything other than crypto. I don't think it works as an argument in favor of PoW, for the same reason "we're only spreading knowledge of chemistry and democratizing process engineering" doesn't work as an argument in favor of drug cartels.
Also, 'SR2Z is right - "cheap energy in developing countries" == coal.
IMO: it's much better than PoW as long as it doesn't end up too centralized. I'm not too sure how I feel about the minimum amount required to stake though, that seems a bit odd.
